Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church condones domestic violence

On Sunday afternoons, Sheri Ferber, a 43-year-old mother of three, listens online to Rick Warren’s sermons, streamed from the 25,000-member Saddleback Church where she was a devoted member for ten years. Although Sheri, pictured here, now lives an hour away in Temecula, California, she hangs on the weekly sermons like a woman in exile. It’s the closest she gets to church these days.

Ferber is a petite strawberry-blonde with a pretty, round-cheeked face, and a voice that sometimes sounds hesitant. Four years ago, she approached a Saddleback pastor for protection against her husband, who’d violently attacked her while they were driving home from church. Instead of protecting her, Ferber says, the pastor called her husband to warn him that Ferber had been “gossiping about their marriage.” Ferber, it seems, had run into Saddleback’s teaching that the sanctity of marriage prohibits divorce in all but a few circumstances, and domestic violence is not one of them. Abused wives could separate from their husbands, Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay explained in audio clips once available on the church website, but only with the intent to reconcile through church counseling.

“There’s something in me that wishes there was a Bible verse that says if they abuse you in this and such kind of way then you can leave them,” said Holladay, but sadly, he concluded, there wasn’t. "It’s not like you can escape the pain,” he said, since the “short-term solution” of divorce leaves the “long-term pain” of a failed marriage. Holladay further qualified that domestic abuse meant regular beatings, not simply a spouse who “grabbed you once.”

The clips were removed from the website this spring, in the months after Warren, the casual-Friday face of “new Evangelicals,” spoke at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. But the underlying problems have not disappeared. Like many conservative churches, particularly fellow Southern Baptist churches, Saddleback teaches a traditional view of gender roles in marriage, where wives submit to husbands’ protection and leadership. Supporters say that in many cases this Christian model of marriage, known as “complementarianism,” can work out well, for both men and women. But in cases where the husband is prone to hitting, experts warn, the teachings can be disastrous: encouraging the abuser and shaming wives into thinking they can’t report the abuse and still be right with God.

Saddleback styles itself as an update to the hidebound American conservative church. Warren is known for his Hawaiian print shirts and approachability. His bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life, is pitched at upwardly mobile Evangelicals, and Saddleback’s “mutual submission” teachings are less authoritarian than strict fundamentalist readings. “The Holy Spirit establishes the husband as the spiritual leader of the home, yet he is not to be domineering,” the website explains. “The wife is to be respectful and submissive, but is not to be considered a doormat.” As such, Saddleback seems a vanguard of new, upwardly mobile American Evangelicals, who are wealthier, better educated and, a 2006 study proposed, more happily married than the rest of the country.

In general, women in traditional Evangelical marriages report greater levels of satisfaction with their husbands’ emotional engagement and domestic help than do more progressive working women, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist and author of Soft Patriarchs and New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. Men in these marriages, says Wilcox, are less likely than other men to become abusive. But this is only true if they are regular churchgoers. “Born again” men who attend church sporadically are actually among the most likely abusers, just as they are the most likely to be divorced, or not living with their children. For these less committed churchgoers, teaching the same lessons about gender roles and the importance of saving marriages at almost any cost can have dangerous consequences.

Tags: baptists, evangelical christianity, Rick Warren, Saddleback Church, Sheri Ferber

Kathryn Joyce is a freelance writer based in New York City and the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

Comments

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By: lamst7b | Tue, 02/09/2010 - 00:14

It has always bothered me that religious institutions qualify for non-taxable status in this country. If a bunch of men want to get together and act like Neanderthals, let them, but why must the rest of the tax paying electorate be compelled to pay for it? Tax Religious Institutions Now!

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By: Janipurr | Thu, 12/17/2009 - 11:58

Emotional Issue ....

By: Happy Promise Keeper | Mon, 11/30/2009 - 16:54

No one denies this is an emotional issue. The problem is, it was handled in an emotional way far outside of what Scripture permits. The Lord has an uncanny way of honoring our petitions when we simply submit to the Bible and the Bible process of handing them. Yes, I very much understand how a non-believer sees this as an issue outside of the church. As a Bible-believing Christian, my authority and my view is based on Sola Scriptura. Christians are not to judge the way the world does. This was a church matter and it should be handled INSIDE the church. If one church mishandles the matter, then you take it to another church until you find one that will hold to Scripture. That's the way it's supposed to be for those professing Christ and a reliance upon the Bible. It requires humility and a willingness to set aside personal agendas. That simply wasn't done in this case.

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By: dmm | Thu, 11/05/2009 - 18:24

Grew up in a VERY conservative fundamentalist Christian home. When I was a teenager (in the 1970s), my father (along with the other church leaders, all men) met with a woman in church who requested the support of the church. She was divorcing her husband, reluctantly, because he was physically abusive. She got the support, 100%. Not only that, but later when she wished to remarry, they ruled that the abuser had abrogated the marriage agreement, and that she was totally allowed to remarry with no prejudice.

I remember this so distinctly because, upon coming home from the meeting, my father got us sons together and told us about it with tears. He then added fiercely that, if we EVER so much as "roughed up" our future wives -- regardless of what they did to "provoke" us -- he would track us down and beat us so badly we'd wish we were dead. Needless to say, none of us have physically mistreated our wives. (Can't deny that I'm a jerk sometimes.) Obviously this would not have worked if I had ever seen my father being hypocritical about this.

So, in summary:
Good modeling by fathers;
Zero tolerance policy;
Tough words of warning to sons;
Support by churches.

p.s. For my fellow Christians out there: abandonment is given in Scripture as grounds for divorce. Physically abusing one's wife is abandonment -- with the possible exception that it is QUICKLY followed by repentance, remorse, acceptance of ALL consequences from the church and the courts, and (permanent) change of behavior. Any church that supports a husband who has struck his wife gets a big FAIL. Make him confess his sin to a judge, not the pastor. "The husband...shall love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it." Can anybody picture Jesus slapping a woman around because she pissed Him off?

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By: Happy Promise Keeper | Wed, 09/23/2009 - 07:22

The 66 Books of the Bible is the standard for all proper conduct. To compare the Bible with some overseas extremists is asinine.

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By: MrJM | Tue, 09/22/2009 - 12:41

Happy Promise Keeper: There is also no place in the Bible where women are permitted to usurp the authority of men in the church or be some kind of a "co-leader" of the household.

Somewhere in Afghanistan, there's a cave missing its religious fundamentalist nut-job.

-- MrJM

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Does Rick Warren’s Church Condone Domestic Violence?